Searching for the Doctor [attn: Rose] cont'd

Donna pulled into her driveway and parked the car, looking over at her passenger. "You're right...it does sound silly when you just say it bluntly like that. I am sorry I laughed, though, because I can't imagine how scary that would've been at the time," she replied.

She looked out the windshield and at her house. "Welcome to my humble abode. Don't think anyone will be home, though I make no guarantees. I reckon if mum is still here, she'll be dying to get out again, since I've taken her car hostage all day."

She paused and looked over at Rose sheepishly. Her passenger was half her age and already infinitely more independent than Donna, herself. What would Rose think or say in response to Donna's admission that she still shared a home - and a vehicle - with her mum?

Deciding to change the subject as she opened her car door and climbed out, closing the door behind her, she waited until she heard Rose's door open - to be certain Rose would be able to hear her - before saying, "and I don't know how we'll find the human particles much less liquify them, either, but we've got to try, haven't we? Unless you've got a better idea..." she joked lightly.

Rose wasn't quite sure what to think about that, but probably wouldn't have said anything even if given the chance, but she did give the woman a reassuring smile.

Things happened sometimes. Something told Rose that the wedding she'd mentioned had probably just gone downhill after the appearing on the TARDIS.

She'd unhooked her seatbelt and opened her door when she heard what Donna'd said next. "Nothing that comes to mind. Unless you've got any clues how to get a message long-range onto some psychic paper." Rose told her with a grin, closing her car door.

For a moment she waited to see what direction Donna went, since of course she had no clue as to which house it was. She took the opportunity to glance around some. It seemed rather...peaceful.

"It's nothing fantastic," Donna prefaced as she headed up the short walkway and up to the front door. "But it'll do the trick. It's getting late. Have you got a place to stay? A friend? Some family? I could take you when we're finished if you haven't got money for a cab."

There was something about Rose that Donna was starting to really like. Rose felt like home. Finally, someone with whom Donna could share her singular amazing experience, who wouldn't chuck her into the nuthouse.

But there was also something about Rose that Donna was still unsure of. She said she wasn't from here, had decided to ride along rather than follow; she'd been sent to a parallel universe and Donna still didn't really know how she'd gotten back here, but she was unsure of how to ask.

"Right, if I had any idea about psychic paper..." her voice trailed off. "Wait, what's psychic paper?" she laughed. "How long did you travel with him, anyway? I had a day and I didn't really go anywhere...I made him bring me back here, daft bint that I am..." she groaned as she led the way inside and made a beeline for the extra room she'd turned into an office.

"My family's back over there, in the other Universe. Could probably call up some of my old mates, but I'm not sure how well that'd go. He said I'm officially dead over here. But..." Rose let her thoughts gather together, remembered an offer.

"There's someone I'd have to look up, but I could explain things to her. She's a reporter... Used to travel with the Doctor though. Come to think of it..." A smile crossed her face. "She might be able to give us a hand looking for things."

"Psychic paper is this paper that's sort of...psychic." Rose couldn't help laughing at her own horrible explanation. "It shows people what you want them to see, what they expect to. He got a message on it once."

How long had she travelled with him, actually? She realized she'd never kept track. "Something like a year..? I.. don't know really. You lose track on there." Rose admitted, following after her.

Donna nodded and showed Rose into the office room. "Right, then, you take the reigns and tell me what I need to do to help you. I really have a good feeling that we can do this if we go about it properly."

She reached down and turned on the computer on the desk and gestured for Rose to take a seat as she crossed the room to grab an extra chair. She pulled it up beside the desk chair and sat. "First step, finding your reporter friend and seeing if she can't help us a little."

"Psychic paper is this paper that's sort of...psychic. It shows people what you want them to see, what they expect to. He got a message on it once."

Smirking slightly, Donna nodded to herself. "Well that sounds awfully useful. Wish I had some," she joked. "I wonder how one would send a message to it..." she mused.

"Something like a year..? I.. don't know really. You lose track on there."

That was something Donna didn't really understand. She grasped the concept, yes, because if the Doctor could travel in time as he said, it made sense that one could lose track of 'real time' quite easily, but just because she 'got' it, didn't mean she understood it. "I can't decide if that sounds lovely or awful..." she said more to herself than to Rose, but aloud all the same.

Rose made her way to the chair, slipping into it and waiting as the computer started up, before bringing up the browser. "I'm gonna try a search for her first... Sarah Jane Smith." She narrated as she worked.

She recieved a list of links, mostly to articles, but none of the information she needed really. "Maybe add some terms..?" As she searched her tongue poked out from between her teeth absently.

"It's dead useful, really. Don't know that myself. Sometimes it can backfire though, an' people see a blank piece of paper." Much as the last link she'd clicked brought up a blank page, which refreshing didn't fix. Shooting it a look, she backed to the search results.

"It's just... there're no calenders, no night and day in the TARDIs even, so if repairs in the Vortex took awhile..."

Donna watched Rose as she navigated the internet almost effortlessly. She gave a running commentary as she went which, honestly, Donna very much appreciated, since otherwise, she probably wouldn't have had much of a clue. She was comfortable enough behind a computer, but hadn't ever really bothered with the internet. It was all new to her.

"It's dead useful, really. Don't know that myself. Sometimes it can backfire though, an' people see a blank piece of paper." Much as the last link she'd clicked brought up a blank page, which refreshing didn't fix.

"Sounds a bit dangerous, then, doesn't it?" Donna asked. "Wait...what was that?" She paused as Rose went back to the search results. "No, go back...what was that? Was that a blank page?" she asked.

Frowning slightly, Donna sat back in her chair. "Why would there be a completely bank page? Not an error message or anything? Try highlighting and see if anything comes up," she suggested. "Worth a shot, yeah?"

"Doesn't happen often." Rose informed her, then paused when she was told to. "Yeah... Normally it's just the page not loading up, happens sometimes." But she had already navigated her way back to the page.

"Don't see why not, won't take a min.." She gave a half-smile in the woman's direction, before she turned her attention back to the screen.

Her left hand hidden on her lap beneath the desk she crossed her fingers. Giving the blank page a challenging look, she moved the cursor slowly up to edit, and hovered over 'select all' for a moment before clicking.

Donna looked curiously at the now highlighted page filled with symbols and font-dingbats. "What is that? Some sort of code?" she asked quietly. "Or maybe just a page in progress with coding errors or something?" She tipped her head to the side and narrowed her eyes, examining it, as if looking for something else.

Truthfully, it looked like a bunch of nothing to Donna, but maybe Rose was better at this. There were letters interspersed with the symbols, but Donna had always been better with numbers. She looked over at Rose almost expectantly. "What do you think?" she finally asked after a long pause. "Waste of time?"

"I'm not sure... Don't think it's coding errors though... Wouldn't be in the white text prob'ly." She guessed for the most part, looking at the screen in carefully concealed bafflement.

"I'll poke at what I can." She decided, playing at what she could reach, waving the cursor over words to see if any of them happened to be links. They weren't, but she right clicked on the page and looked at the options it gave her.

"Source?" It sounded familiar, and she clicked, earning herself a... page full of the same symbols and letters, this time black on white. She scrolled through them, not noticing a small sequence of numbers that hadn't been on the highlighted page as she did so.

"Stop, stop, stop!" Donna breathed. "That wasn't on the page!"

She looked over Rose's shoulder at the jumble of letters and symbols alike, all of it looking about as useful to her as Chinese, which she could obviously not have read, but then she saw a set of numbers going up the screen as Rose scrolled.

"D'you see that? Right there," she said, pointing. "Numbers. That's the only thing I'm really good at: numbers. And I'd have noticed them on the screen. What's this thing, you've got here? What's 'source'?"

"If you say so..." Rose glanced at them, stopping the page to leave them visible on the screen. "Source. It's like... the coding they use to make the site." She thought for a way to rephrase it.

"Like a behind the scenes thing. Think that's what he said..." She looked curiously at the string of numbers. 72724-5263-76484-(01274)605475. Rose couldn't make heads or tails out of them, but hoped Donna could. Something did seem deliberate there...

Donna stared at the numbers for a long time, contemplating. There were too many to be a phone number, she thought, and no lettering to make out a street address. "Print that out, could you?" she asked suddenly, reaching over to her right to turn on her printer. "Two copies. It'll be easier on our eyes and I've got about a trillion highlighters..." she said, voice trailing off.

If Rose could go through, highlighting the letters, then maybe Donna could work out the puzzle. Ostracizing the letters from the symbols, then perhaps coupling them with the letters, the two of them could, at the very least, get a Jumble out of the mix and then take it from there.

She explained as much to Rose, adding, "maybe when we can separate it all, we can put it back together again properly...maybe there's a message or an address...dates, timestamps...anything. It's worth a go; maybe we can find your friend like that, even if it looks like she might not want to be found..."

"Right, sounds like a plan." Highlighting she could do, and she moved to click the print button, changing the number of copies to two in the box that wanted it. As far as she could tell they printed without issue.

"There has to be something in here." Rose agreed. "Might've gotten scrambled somehow..." Encrypted maybe? She wished these words would stop popping into her head unless they'd tell her something. There'd been too much technical talk around her lately.

This was something though, a step. Even if it didn't get them Sarah Jane, something told Rose that it wasn't going to be a dead end. She took another look at the screen as she gave the pages time to print off. They were a few sheets long each. As soon as she could, she got to work.

On a blank sheet of paper, Donna wrote out the numbers exactly as they were shown on her print out. As Rose highlighted the letters, Donna wrote them all down on that same blank sheet, leaving liberal spaces between each, so as not to confuse them both further by creating words that weren't actually words.

It seemed like forever and a day had gone past and they were still working. Donna asked Rose to check and re-check the page, now littered with highlights, at least three times, to make sure she hadn't missed any letters in the mix of things.

"Right. I can't make anything of the first three sets of numbers, but the last...looks like a phone number, but that area code...I know it from work and only from snooping about. It's a special one; you have to pay to have it. That'd make sense if your friend didn't want to be found..." She paused, trying to remember what cities the area code covered.

"I think it's in Bradford or...Cleckheaton..." Donna said. "It's somewhere in West Yorkshire, I know that much. Can you do a search for the phone number...see if it's a real number?" she asked.

She looked over the letters on the page, then. "And this...I'm awful with word puzzles..." she sighed, frowning and sliding the paper across the desk to Rose. "Maybe you can make something of it? Maybe it's a street address if we plug in some of the numbers...or...a message or something?" she suggested.

"It would..." Rose paused, struck by another idea. "What if she's not just being secret in general, and she's hiding from something specific?" After all, journalists tended to try to be easy to get ahold of, didn't they? As she mulled over the thought, she took the paper, glancing down at it.

"Should be able to do that, yeah..." Her attention turned to the screen, and she plugged the numbers into the search engine. "I'm not getting anything. Could be it's private though, maybe. Or..." She frowned as she tried to think of some other reason. Coming up with nothing, she let the thought trail off with a shrug.

Rose focused on the paper, looking through it carefully. "I'll see what I can do." There seemed to be alot of 'e's on the page, they were common, weren't they?

She tried things as they came to her head, filling out another page with alphabetical debris as she worked. Changed the numbers to the letters they stood for as far as a=1, etc. Tried using pairs of them to select letters via a sort of grid. Rose even took a swipe at messing with the lot of them in attempt to unscramble them, and in a brief stroke of inspiration tried looking through them word-search style. None of it got any sensical results.

Donna took over the computer, looking around and clicking links at random as Rose seemed to be trying to work out the letters in any way, shape, or form the girl seemed to be able to think of. And then, all at once, it dawned on Donna.

"Oh, my God, we're so daft..." she said, annoyed with herself. "Let's just call the bloody number and try to trace its location. Have you got a mobile? If we make the call and manage to get connected, we should be able to call the phone company and ask for a location of the number, yeah?"

Donna was still new at investigating things. The furthest she'd ever prodded something was... She paused, mid-thought, frowning. She'd never tried to prod anything significantly, come to think of it. She realized wasn't very clever, the more she thought about it.

Scrolling back up the page Rose had pulled up in the search engine, Donna tried her own search for the first time. Human Particles

A linked message popped up. Did you mean Huan Particles?

"Maybe I did," she thought aloud, clicking the link. She clicked the first option that came up and after reading a paragraph, it sounded about right to her, so she changed her search once again. Blue Box Doctor Huan Particles

"Oi, Rose...they're not Human Particles, they Huan Particles and look at this..." she said, pointing to the search results.

Rose looked dumbfounded for a long couple moments. Calling the number. She'd have thought it would make sense as the first thing to do with a phone number. Once she'd snapped out of it, she gave Donna an embarrased look.

"Yeah, got it right here... Might not even have to do the tracking thing if we're lucky." She decided as she rescued her mobile from a pocket of her jacket. Glance switching from paper to phone, she dialed the numbers, pressing send once they were in.

With the phone held up to her ear, but away from her mouth, Rose looked at the search results on the screen. Her eyes glanced over a sales ad, and then a site advertising a Doctor Huano, before getting to the results that had caught her eye.

The phone rung in her ear, but she wasn't really listening to it. "Huan... Makes more sense then human I'd think yeah. Let's give it that a look..."

Clicking on the link, Donna looked over her shoulder at Rose, who still had the mobile pressed to her ear. "Anything? Answer, voicemail...?" she prodded anxiously before turning her eyes back to the screen. "Rose, it's him," she gasped upon seeing a headline reading The Doctor and His Blue Box. She reached back to grab for Rose to get her attention, but only succeeded in giving Rose a backhand to the arm in trying to do so. "It's says the Doctor..." she said slowly, voice trailing off, and frowning as she scrolled down the screen a little more to the pictures below.

Glancing at the screen, Donna could see a picture of a tall, thin man with a brush cut, standing beside the TARDIS out in a field. He wasn't looking at the camera, but Donna knew well enough to know that wasn't her Doctor. Scrolling down the page, there was more pictures of him, mainly in historical places, even on the grassy knoll the day the United States President Kennedy had been assassinated.

"It says it's the Doctor on all of these pictures, but..." she said quietly, furrowing her brow. It wasn't the Doctor.

"Just... ringing." Rose told her, then rubbed her arm before she leaned over Donna's shoulder. She watched the screen as the pictures scrolled past, most familiar. At her last comment, she reached put her hand on the woman's shoulder.

"It's him." She assured her, trying to figure out how to explain this. "Just... different. An earlier version. There's... this thing he can do. Where he changes instead of dying. Regeneration."

Rose thought back to that scene in the TARDIS, and the Doctor burning away into another man.

"It's him though, or will be. Pinstriped suit and trainers, sort of...hair?" She offered the description up, complete with hair miming. "I think I need to try starting over..."

Rose had said that the Doctor could change rather than die and that alone had Donna itching to ask what had happened, but she felt she would be overstepping an invisible line between the newfound friends and she didn't want to do that. Not yet, that was for sure.

She looked back at the screen and frowned. No matter what Rose said, this man wasn't Donna's Doctor. She could only imagine how it must have felt for Rose if she'd been with him when he'd looked like this and then also after he'd changed. Donna didn't want to think about it; it hurt her heart.

"It's him though, or will be. Pinstriped suit and trainers, sort of...hair?"

Looking back over her shoulder at Rose, Donna nodded. "Skinny as a rail, yeah?" she joked. "Pleasantly arrogant and in love with himself, a bit, as well?"

She stifled a laugh, but smiled at Donna. "Yeah." Rose admitted, realizing she couldn't really disagree. "A bit. Rambles on at about a million miles a second..." But so excited about it his enthusiasm was almost infectious sometimes.

There were a million other things she could think of to say about him, most of them gushing. She stopped herself before she started though, expecting that she'd know, or that it wouldn't be very appreciated. Everything had bubbled over to the top of her mind and she fought for something to say.

Her smile widened slightly as she remembered something. "Wanna know something he described himself as not long after he changed?"

Donna leaned back in her chair, smiling. Rose was gushing about the Doctor like a school girl in love. It was sort of adorable. What she saw in the man...strike that. Alien. ...was beyond Donna, in a physical sense, but even Donna could admit that the Doctor's energy was infectious. It was part of why she missed him and was trying to find him again.

"Wanna know something he described himself as not long after he changed?"

"Sure!" Donna exclaimed, although, on the inside, suddenly she was wondering what would happen if they did manage to find the Doctor. Would he still be interested in taking Donna along if he found his long, lost friend, Rose? Surely not, Donna thought with a sudden pang of jealousy.

"Rude and not ginger." Rose informed her with an amused smile. "He was really disapointed 'bout the brown." Her eyes flicked pointedly to Donna's hair. She thought that might amuse her.

Rose liked what she'd seen of Donna so far. Could see a sort of common denominator in the little she knew. She didn't have any real problem imagining that if-, when they found the Doctor, they'd both go. After all, he'd asked her once, hadn't he? It wasn't like it would be the first time travelling with more than two people in the TARDIS. She had a rather strong bout of optimism at the moment.

Donna smiled slightly. "Yeah? What, he's never been ginger? It's not as much fun as one might think, sometimes," she joked, her voice light.

"All right, so what's the plan? Keep lookin' for your reporter friend? Try the number again? Keep searching for information on the Doctor and see if we find any recent sightings?" Donna asked. "I'm new at this whole investigative thing I'm trying to do here..." she added sheepishly.

She hoped they could find him again. Saying no to the Doctor's invitation was the single most awful thing she'd ever done in her life. It was the one thing she really and truly regretted and she was dying for another chance to meet him. That was the moment she silently vowed if she ever did find him again, she'd travel with him forever.